


The Hazards of Drinking

by Spoodlemonkey



Category: The Expendables (Movies)
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, Lee is not impressed, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-29
Updated: 2015-01-29
Packaged: 2018-03-09 15:04:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3254129
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Spoodlemonkey/pseuds/Spoodlemonkey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Consciousness comes back to him abruptly with the subtlety of a sledge hammer.<br/>It comes with a pounding head ache, dry mouth, and the realization that he most definitely isn’t at Barney’s or at the hangar. In fact he’s pretty sure that wherever he is, he’s in a basement. Not a bunker, or a cell, or the hundreds of other places he’s woken up in and will probably continue to while in this line of business, but someone’s basement.<br/>It’s just plain insulting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Hazards of Drinking

**Author's Note:**

> This really is just an excuse to write Hurt!Lee and the liberal use of duct tape (especially now that I know how to get out of duct tape).

Consciousness comes back to him abruptly with the subtlety of a sledge hammer. 

It comes with a pounding head ache, dry mouth, and the realization that he most definitely isn’t at Barney’s or at the hangar. In fact—he squints in the dim light provided by a small corner window (that while Yang might have been able to fit through, the tiny fucker, Lee most certainly cannot)—he’s pretty sure that wherever he is, he’s in a basement. Not a bunker, or a cell, or the hundreds of other places he’s woken up in and will probably continue to while in this line of business, but someone’s basement.

There is a washing machine in the corner, the white faded from years of use. Whoever managed to get a hold of him is only lucky there isn’t any laundry in it—it sits silently against the wall—otherwise he’d probably just strangle them with it.

It’s just plain insulting.

Pounding head, dry mouth and a horrible taste at the back of his throat—he’s been drugged before and recognizes it quickly. It’s never fun, especially when it screws with your memories of the period before and makes it difficult to remember who the bad guy is and who isn’t. 

He remembers a pretty young thing; he’d thought she had been one of Tools ex’s, the man certainly had enough of them, so he’d gone along with her flirting for a while, bought her a drink and killed time until Barney got back from wherever he and Galgo had gone off to for supplies or something of the like. He loved Barney but he wasn’t going along just for the manual labour when Galgo was in one of his moods. Something had set him off and he’d been talking nonstop for the past two days—Lee was taking a break while he could.

So, the pretty young thing had to be in on it—maybe the bar tender; he can’t quite remember what either looked like. 

The irritation from waking up in a basement ramps up with the knowledge that he let himself get drugged. 

Yeah, he’s not staying any longer.

Lee grunts and rolls onto his side. They’ve duct taped his wrists and ankles. Oh this is just getting more ridiculous—the others are never going to let him live this down.

With a little bit of effort he manages to sit up and takes a moment to just breathe, to stop the world from spinning quite so dramatically. He’s been awake for at least five minutes now and no one has come down to investigate—he can hear the sound of raised voices coming from the floor above, can hear feet moving around. Someone’s not happy, he thinks with some glee. 

He can’t wait to get his fingers around the neck of whichever jackass came up with this grand scheme.

Lee lifts his arms above his head and wrenches down, tries to break the duct tape. It doesn’t give on the first go, but in this case second time is the charm. He gets the remainder off his ankles and spends a moment walking the perimeter of the basement, getting the feeling back in his extremities and looking for anything he can use as a weapon—better safe than sorry.

The remainder of the basement is pretty bare though; they’ve at least managed to do something right, he muses.

The stairs creak as he eases his way up them, but judging by the continued arguing no one has noticed yet. Lee pauses at the top to listen; it’s easier to hear the voices on the other side of the thin wood.

“-didn’t say anything about murder.” One voice hisses.

“We all knew it might be a possibility.” Another man chimes in, voice firm. Lee has a feeling he’s found their ringleader already. 

“God Neil, grow a pair,” he recognizes the girl from the night before, can put a face to her voice now—dark hair and darker eyes. Huh—apparently he may have a type. “He’s seen my face, he’s seen Rick’s face—the buyer hasn’t shown up with our money. If we don’t kill him he’s going to go right back to that biker gang he’s in and they’re going to come after us. Do you ever actually think?”

Lee nearly snorts. He’d really like to know where these kids have been getting their information. He’s starting to wonder if he can just not mention this to Barney once he’s out of there. The entire affair is embarrassing for everyone involved, really. 

The footsteps pace in front of the thin wooden door and Lee decides that it’s time to leave.

It doesn’t take much to shatter the door as he braces himself on the frame; it shatters, knocks into the man on the other side of the door and sends him to the ground, groaning and barely conscious. The other guy, a skinny little thing, freezes so Lee goes after the girl first. She screams in rage and lunges at him, throws a few good hits, but he has her flipped, crashing into the spindly kitchen table and out like a light before her friend can recover. The skinny little guy goes for a knife but Lee breaks his wrist and bounces his head off the counter before his hands can actually close around the handle. 

And then there’s silence, only broken by the sound of the house settling around them.

He’s actually a little disgusted with how anticlimactic it all is.

He’s dressed only in his jeans and white Henley, so first things first—secure the rest of the house and find his stuff. He hadn’t had much on him at the bar, but he’d had a throwing knife he was particularly fond of and would like back.

It’s all easy enough to find, tossed on the couch in their dingy little living room, nothing missing which takes a weight off his shoulders. The house is silent; with a little digging he finds the duct tape they probably used on him and repays them the favour, taping their mouths in the process as well. He doesn’t want to hear them whine when they wake up.

“Christmas,” Barney answers on the first ring. “Where the hell have you been?”

Lee can hear the engine of Barney’s truck in the background, takes a quick glance at the screen on his phone and winces when he realizes it’s eight in the morning and he’s apparently been MIA for the better part of ten hours. 

“Got grabbed.” He admits with a wince. 

“What?” Barney’s voice is flat, cold and filled with the threat of pain for whoever gets in his way now.

“Hack job.” Lee continues, hearing the engine rev. He pokes his head out the front door to get the house number and the street and then rattles them off to Barney. “I’m alright; the fuckers drugged me and tossed me in their basement.” 

He doesn’t try and hide how offended he is by it all and apparently it relaxes Barney enough for him to chuckle.

“Only you Lee.” He rumbles affection clear in his voice and Lee’s caught off guard (as he so often is) by how much he cares about this man.

“The guys are going to love this,” he complains and heads back to the kitchen to check on his captives. He isn’t expecting them to be awake so it’s a bit of a surprise when there is suddenly a fourth person in the kitchen with them, halfway through the backdoor. 

It’s clearly a surprise to the man as well, who seems frozen with wide eyes. 

For a long moment they stare at each other, Lee notes vaguely that he resembles the girl as he quickly goes through the easiest ways to add the newcomer to his duct tape collection on the kitchen floor.

“Lee?” Barney’s voice travels clearly through the phone and it’s enough to startle them both into movement. Lee grabs the closest object—a toaster of all things—and flings it. It hits the man square in the temple and his legs crumple, eyes rolling back as his hand comes up.

There’s a bang, the newcomer hits the ground unconscious, and his gun skitters across the floor to settle someplace out of sight.

“Lee?” Barney is all but shouting now and Lee takes pity on him, reaching to grab the phone from where it had fallen in the brief chaos.

Only bending over becomes a bit of a problem with the sudden pain that snakes through his body and steals his breath away. He chokes on the burning, spikes of pain. His legs crumple under him and he slides, awkwardly, down the ugly kitchen cabinets with their peeling paint. 

He fumbles for the phone, closes his fingers around it with difficulty.

“Barney.” He breathes. 

“Lee, what the fuck happened?” The ‘are you alright’ goes unsaid but heard nonetheless. 

“I think I’m going to need you to get here a little faster.” He says rather calmly, he believes. His hand, resting on his stomach, comes away red and wet. The blood soaks his white Henley at an alarming speed. He presses down on the wound with a grunt, jaw clenched at the bright wash of pain it sends through him.

He’s been shot before, a few grazes, one to the thigh, the shoulder—it comes with the territory unfortunately. He’s avoided any stomach wounds up until now; they bleed more, are messier, more dangerous.

Barney says something back but Lee misses it, the phone lying on the floor next to him somehow instead of where it should be, in his hands. He ignores it, focuses on pressing with both hands against the wound, trying to slow the flow of his blood from his body.

Time slips by; he doesn’t even think of calling an ambulance, though the others will give him shit for it later. It doesn’t cross his mind—all he can think is: Barney is coming. Barney is coming and all he has to do is hold on for him. 

Somehow his eyes slip closed as he waits—too heavy to keep open. His mind is hazy; he should tie the other guy up, what if he wakes up? He should call an ambulance; they all have field training but he thinks it might need a little more than a bandage this time. But all that keeps circling through his mind is Barney and the feeling of safety that comes with the name.

He’s a sap when he loses a bit of blood, he muses. It’s getting harder to stay awake; surely Barney must be close by now? He pry’s his eyes open but all he sees is a puddle of blood surrounding him. 

Huh, he thinks blearily, must have nicked something important.

His eyes slip closed again.

::

This time consciousness comes back slowly. It trickles in, slow like molasses. 

The sounds filter in first. The sound of machines, of quiet voices, he knows these sounds well from the other times he’s ended up in a hospital. Then the smells, the disinfectant, the sharp sterile smell of the sick and dying, and at the very edge of that, the smell of grease and gun powder. Lee tries to focus on the latter, but it’s hard to focus on anything at the moment. 

The sheets feel rough under his skin, a light blanket covering him and the slight tug of an IV line. 

“I think he’s waking up!” It takes him a moment to place the voice. There’s the sound of shuffling and he wonders if Caesar is moving closer to the bed. He wonders how Caesar feels, barely a year later and already stuck back in a hospital room again. 

“Christmas?” Barney’s voice rumbles, hesitant, light, like he’s trying to keep quiet just in case Lee is still out. “Lee?”

The light above him is dim but it still takes him a moment to adjust to, blinking away the spots in his vision. He pushes past the sleep still clinging to him, trying to drag him back under, to focus on the people surrounding him for as long as he can stay awake. 

Twelve smiling faces beam back at him.

“How the hell did you all fit in here?” He croaks, closes his eyes against the blinding image. 

“With great difficulty.” Trench tells him, appearing vaguely mischievous. Mischievous of all things—he may have woken up in hell.

"A bunch of kids, Christmas?" Doc smirks. "Really?

"And a merry fuck you too," Lee contemplates flipping him off but decides it's not worth the extra effort required.

“You can all get your time with him later,” Barney stands next to Lee’s side, a discarded chair behind him. He waves the others out of the room with a, “I get him first.”

He closes the door behind them and Lee thanks every deity he can think of there isn’t an observation window like the one Caesar had had to have. He tries to shift, to sit up, but the pain that hadn’t been there before makes itself suddenly known and he hisses, cursing dumbasses with guns everywhere. 

“Shit, you okay?” Barney helps him get settled again and then drags the chair close to the bed, rubbing his hands over his face with a sigh.

“How long was I out?” 

Barney drops his hands and lets his head hang.

“Two days.” 

“Not too bad.” Lee nods. He stifles a yawn.

“Two of the worst days of my life.” Barney doesn’t look up as he says this and Lee frowns. “Fuck Lee, you had nearly bled out by the time I got you to the hospital.”

He reaches out, tangles a hand in the dark hair and yanks just hard enough to get Barney to look up.

“But I didn’t.” He says clearly. He releases his hold on Barney’s hair and blindly gropes about until Barney grasps his hand, holding tightly. “You got to me in time. Just because I was stupid enough to end up in that fucked up situation,”

Barney cuts him off with a kiss—he surges forward, their noses bump together, teeth clack. It’s a terrible kiss, they’ve shared better with smoke and blood between them, but it’s full of affection and so much they can’t say but desperately need to share. Somehow Lee manages to soften it, to curl a hand around the nape of Barney’s neck, angle his head until they fit together the way they always have—perfectly. 

Then it’s nothing but heat and feeling and somehow we survived again. 

“They’re making out.” Mars announces, shutting the door almost immediately after opening it, to the sound of bright laughter in the hall. 

They pull apart but don’t go far, foreheads pressed together, breathing each other in. 

“I didn’t think I’d get to do that again.” Barney admits, voice full of glass shards that cut deep, that make Lee wince because he put them there.

“Can’t get rid of me that easy.” 

“You’re as bad as the plague.” Barney mumbles and Lee fixes him with an affronted look that’s completely wrecked when he can’t stifle the yawn that slips past. Barney watches him with something dangerously close to fondness on his face. “You should get some sleep. The blood loss,”

“I know how blood loss works.” Lee waves him off. Barney’s expression becomes pinched but Lee just rolls his eyes and settles back into the pillows. He’s starting to get the feeling that if he keeps his movements minimal, the drugs will keep him pain free for a while.

“Stop being a grouch,” he continues, eyeing the size of the bed. “I’d invite you up here but…”

“Hate to break it to you, but that bed is not built for two Christmas.” Barney instead slides the chair as close as he can get it, clasps Lee’s hand loosely and settles in for the long haul. “Get some more sleep—I’ll keep the kids from making too much noise.”

Lee wants to laugh, because it’s close to impossible with four of them together to keep quiet, how is he going to manage with twelve, but he’s already past the point where replying seems like a good idea. His body feels heavy, mind cloudy, and sleep sounds like the best option at the moment.

Barney squeezes his hand gently. 

Lee’s out again long before the others poke their heads back in.

**Author's Note:**

> Can you imagine waking up to the sight of twelve Expendables (and co.)? I can't decide if it would be amazing or terrifying. (Probably amazing.)  
> Also apparently, if for some reason you ever get duct taped, just lift your arms above your head and then force them down and apart and the stuff tears pretty easily. Just in case...you never know!


End file.
